Yes, still on RW Classic, yeah. There was a time when finding Rapidweaver platform felt like a genuine discovery - simple, elegant, no CS degree required. That was the whole point, right?
Things shift. The plugin era came, Stacks too, the whole ecosystem with price tag to match; lots of promise, some good stuff, a fair amount of abandonware. Fine. Now there’s Elements. It looks impressive, genuinely. The Realmac team clearly put in the work, and if you’re on a latest Mac with time to study, explore and a budget to match - great, honestly.
But somewhere along the way, with Elements, the person who just needs a simple, clean, responsive website without turning the software learning curve into a part-time job got quietly shown the door. Every new email about new addons, components and frameworks and whatnot just makes the gap feel a little wider.
No hard feelings. It just makes me a little sad that what once felt like home no longer seems built for people like me. Probably time to see what else is out there.
I understand what you’re feeling. No one is taking away rapid weaver classic from you and you can continue to use it and develop websites.
I too miss iWeb in the old ways simple ways of making websites. It was very fun.
Don’t negate elements yet. You can close panels and still work in a very simple way I chose elements after seeing Dan do a demo of building the website.
Once I saw how easy it was, I made the change. Perhaps invest some time and watching the let’s build websites series and see if elements is right for you.
I was going to make the move to Elements, but then I had to back off as I’d have to buy a new Mac…RW was such an improvement from MS FrontPage..now I’m exploring Foundation 6 simply because I really didn’t want to spend more on hardware. If it ain’t broke, why fix it !
As much as I enjoy Mac’s, I have a dislike for the ever changing upgrades Apple puts out at huge cost. Iphone’s, MacBook Air’s, IMac’s - Etc.
Are you on an older Intel Mac? I don’t like unnecessarily upgrading hardware either, but if you are on an older Intel Mac, I’d 100% recommend switching over to the newer Apple Silicon Macs. The difference is night and day, there just isn’t any comparison..
If you are looking for a cost effective solution, perhaps a refurbished older generation Apple Silicon MacBook, or a Mac Mini, or the new MacBook Neo (although not sure I’d want to build websites on small screen real estate…)
It doesn’t get any easier than Elements. It’s drop dead simple, especially if all you want is a simple design. Your not going to find anything even close, trust me, I’ve tried them all…lol
You can try starting from an existing project and customizing it. The differences between the two programs require an initial effort but after a while you’ll become familiar with Elements.
If you’re in the Apple ecosystem—I’ve been in it for 50 years—you have to understand when you should change versus the usual iteration temptations.
PowerPC and then later Intel were should change points. If you didn’t, you got locked in time. Apple Silicon (M1 through now M5) was another. Intel is now dead, and you’ll find that software supporting it will go away soon. Which puts you in not only a locked-in-time situation, but also at a security risk.
Given that a Mac that can effectively run Elements and everything else that most folk typically run (mail, browser, word processor, spreadsheet, et.al.) can be under US$600 these days, there’s really no reason not to move on from Intel-based Macs.
In terms of underlying building blocks for Web development, Foundation was good for its time, but it has fallen mostly out of favor for things like Tailwind (which is what Elements uses). When you look at who’s using which framework these days, all the big players are using/supporting Tailwind; not so much Foundation.
Which leads me to this: I’ve been in very high tech both as an originator and user since 1976. You don’t stay in the game if you keep finding yourself in dead ends. Moreover, eventually everything becomes a dead end (we’ve been watching Intel headed down that cul-de-sac). The trick is to not turn down known dead-ends, and to find a good alternate route before the problem locks you in.
You say “if it ain’t broke…” That’s not the right analogy. Think more of a tire: it’s going flat. If the reason that it’s going flat is severe enough, you’re going to need to replace it, not patch it.
